Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation –
Challenges from a Sociolinguistic Perspective
Abstract
In recent years, historical sociolinguists have started to look at developments that are
shared by European or ‘Western’ languages not only from a typological, but also from
a sociohistorical point of view (e.g. Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003; Vandenbussche
and Elspaß 2007). In the light of the standardization histories of such languages after
the Middle Ages, external factors of language change appear to be more influential than
internal factors. The traditional histories of most European languages focus on written
language (which is intertwined with the spread of the written word, particularly via
printed texts) and they are determined by such factors as the rise of standard varieties
(entailing a suppression of other languages and varieties, e.g. regional dialects) and
the selection and codification of variants (entailing a stigmatization of other variants),
which are governed by notions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ language(s). In this paper, we
will present and discuss some key developments in the history of New High German
against the background of the rise of standard (High) German and the standard language
ideology in the German-speaking countries. The case of negation in German will serve
as a concrete example to illustrate these developments.
1. Objectives and structure of the paper
In this paper, we will firstly reassess the traditional description of a particular
grammatical phenomenon in the light of new data and advances in the field of Historical
Sociolinguistics. The phenomenon under scrutiny is polynegation in New High German.
The second part of this paper presents some ideas on a view of language history as seen
‘from above’ and ‘from below’ respectively. In the third part, some established as well
as recent views on the history of negation in German will be portrayed, in particular
with respect to the question whether Jespersen’s cycle is a model which can adequately
account for this history. Part four presents metalinguistic as well as (new) linguistic
data from New High German and discusses the possible impact of such data for a
reassessment of the history of negation. From there, the concluding section five will
look more generally at the value of sociolinguistic approaches for historical linguistics
and will plead, in particular, for an acknowledgement of ‘oral’ varieties in the research
on historical grammar and grammatical change.
2. Language history (and the history of New High German) viewed from different angles
Traditional textbooks on the history of German – like textbooks on the history of most
other Western languages – are dominated by two notions:
– a teleological approach to language history, cf. the notion of a ‘unified German
language’ and the route metaphor in phrases like “der Weg zur Hochsprache” ‘the
way to the standard language’ (Bach 1965: 468) or “Auf dem Wege zur Sprach­
einheit” ‘on the way to language unity’, “Wege zur Höhe (ca. 1750 bis 1790)”
‘routes to the zenith (ca. 1750 to 1790)’ (Eggers 1986, chapter titles), and
–
the presentation of historical periods of German as (more or less) separate and
‘closed systems’ (e.g. Roelcke 2009, Speyer 2010).
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The first notion (language teleology) has resulted in accounts in which language
histories were told as long marches toward uniform standard languages. Language
history was largely reduced to the study of literary or chancellery language, thus
conceptionally written and formal language. For German, language historians
suggested – though this is no longer current wisdom – that standard language
varieties existed as early as the Early (court of Charlemagne) and the High Middle
Ages (Courtly Romance). Luther’s contribution in the sixteenth century was equally
seen as standing in the long tradition of further refinement of the language, and his
mythical position as the father of standard or High German is still commonplace
in popular belief and non-specialist account of German language history. As
regards the post-reformation period of New High German, in particular since 1650,
virtually the only interest of language historians lay with printed texts, as these
were seen as representing the language proper. From a sociolinguistic point of
view, the focus on the printed medium often coincided with a focus on the high
varieties employed by some privileged groups of the societies, thus minorities in
the respective populations. ‘Non-standard’ variation – let alone language use by
non-elites – was usually regarded as corrupt and unsuitable for linguistic research.
This notion may be termed ‘a view from above’, and it is strongly influenced by the
modern ‘standard language ideology’ (Milroy and Milroy 1985: 22–23).
The second notion, the idea of uniform language systems in different language
periods, has led to a simplistic view of language change. Identifying distinct
historical periods such as Old English, Old High German, Middle High German, or
Middle Dutch served as a means of coming to terms with the wealth of diverse data
from closely related language varieties from a certain period in time, and it thus
permitted large-scale comparisons between different groups of varieties from a
typological perspective. However, it has long been known that these categorisations
are based on simplified data sets (e.g. ‘normalised’ historical texts in the Lachmann
tradition of ‘restoring’ Middle High German; cf. Fleischer and Schallert 2011:
64–66 for an instructive example of ‘supplementing’ such texts with additional
instances of double negation!). In data sets of this kind, linguistic variation was
seen as exceptional and best to be ignored. The standard language ideology,
which promoted the idea of invariant languages, is, in our view, fundamentally
ill-conceived. The nineteenth-century idea, for instance, – still maintained by
The terms ‘conceptually oral language’ and ‘conceptually written language’ refer to
Koch’s and Oesterreicher’s (1985) model of ‘language of immediacy’ vs. ‘language of
distance’ (Nähesprache vs. Distanzsprache). In contrast to the dichotomy between the
‘written’ and the ‘spoken’ medium, the linguistic conception of a text can be established
only relative to prototypical texts of ‘immediacy’ and prototypical texts of ‘distance’. Texts
of a particular text type are placed on a continuum between oral and literate, according to a
specific combination of communicative parameters, such as ‘degree of orality vs. degree of
literateness’, ‘plannedness’, ‘degree if situational formality’ etc. Cf. Oesterreicher (1997)
for further explanations of the model in English.
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
277
many today – that a fairly uniform Middle High German existed in the Middle
Ages was motivated by nationalist historiography (for a critical discussion, cf.
Durrell 2000) and the conscious and active disregard of linguistic variation found
in contemporary texts. Whilst this practice is no secret to modern scholars, many
historical grammars of, say, German are still based on a very limited and, in many
instances, artificially standardised set of texts. Studying language with this type of
textual basis will result in a picture of linguistic homogeneity, not borne out by a
broader evidence base. This has repercussions for our understanding of language
change which, because of the narrow empirical foundation, can look much slicker
than it actually was, as we shall argue is the case for the application of Jespersen’s
cycle to the history of German.
The effects of these two notions and their underlying ideologies are particularly
noticeable in the language histories of the most recent periods, which for many
modern languages arguably begin roughly in the seventeenth century. Socio­
linguistically, the modern period is a particularly interesting period in the
histories of languages like English, French, German, Dutch etc., not least because
of radical changes in their social history, such as the rising literacy rates, the
massive increase and diversification of written language data and, in particular,
the effects of standardization processes (cf. Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003).
Particularly for the modern period, where a wide range of text types is available
for scholarly inspection, it would seem to be a strangely narrow enterprise to write
language histories solely on the basis of data from historical grammars, which are
traditionally based on selected varieties and text types and which do not take into
account language-external factors.
The modern period thus appears to be an ideal testing ground for the study
of language change from a radically new perspective in language historiography,
away from a ‘view from above’ to a ‘language history from below’. A ‘from below’
approach has basically two aspects (cf. Elspaß 2005: 3–20, 2007a: 4–5):
Firstly, a ‘language history from below’ would focus on the language use of
larger sections of the population, particularly the lower classes, and thus it is a
first step to a long overdue consideration of the vast majority of the population
in language historiography. From the Early Modern period onwards, these people
were not just dialect speakers, but increasingly also readers and writers, due to the
‘demotization’ of the written language after the Middle Ages (Maas 1985) and
massive literacy drives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This is true even for the 24th edition of Hermann Paul’s Middle High German grammar
(Paul 241998), which most contemporary introductions to Middle High German are based
upon. The editors’ team of the revised 25th edition (Paul 252007) aimed at a consideration
of a wider range of text types. The chapter on negation, however, has remained virtually
unchanged from previous editions (cf. the editor’s note ibid.: VII).
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Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer
Secondly, the concept ‘from below’ calls for a different starting point of the
description and explanation of language history. It involves an acknow­ledg­ment of
those language registers which are basic to human interaction. The point of departure
for research would be the concept of ‘lan­guage of immediacy’ or ‘conceptual
orality’ (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher 1985), which is prototypically represented by
speech in face-to-face-interaction. For obvious reasons, we cannot access spoken
data from the time before the twentieth century. A ‘language history from below’
would thus start with metalinguistic data and the analysis of texts which are “as
close to speech, and especially vernacular styles, as possible” (Schneider 2002:
71). Such material is perhaps best represented in ego-documents, such as personal
letters and diaries (cf. Elspaß 2012 for discussion).
In this paper, some key developments in the history of New High German against
the background of the rise of standard (High) German and the standard language
ideology in the German-speaking countries will be presented. The case of negation
in German will serve as an example to illustrate the effects of such processes on the
development of a particular grammatical phenomenon.
As is common with many Germanic languages, language histories traditionally
divided German into different historical stages, often in the form of convenient
chunks of about three hundred years each. In this line of tradition, the history of
German is divided into four stages:
Table 1. Language periods in the history of German (traditional version)
Old High German (beginning to c. 1050)
Middle High German (c. 1050 to c. 1350)
Early New High German (c. 1350 to c. 1650)
New High German (from c. 1650)
To reflect the significant differences between the language and sociolinguistics
of the stage before 1945 and today, Elspaß (2008) suggested a fifth period in
distinguishing between ‘Middle New High German’ period and ‘Late Middle New
High German’ or ‘Contemporary High German’:
Table 2. Language periods in the history of German (revised version)
Old High German (beginning to c. 1050)
Middle High German (c. 1050 to c. 1350)
Early New High German (c. 1350 to c. 1650)
Middle New High German (c. 1650 to c. 1950)
Late New High German or Contemporary High German (from c. 1950)
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
279
The main difference between the ‘Middle New High German’ period and ‘Late
Middle New High German/Contemporary High German’ is that in the former the first
language of the majority of speakers was a dialect, with the predecessor of modern
standard German being restricted to conceptually written texts and higher language
registers. For most members of the generations born in the second half of twentieth
century Germany and later, a (regionally marked) variety of standard German has
become the mother tongue. Thus, whilst in the Middle New High German period,
significant numbers of people had been diglossic (with the local dialect being
the dominating variety in spoken language), the majority of the population in the
German-speaking areas (except for Switzerland) is today monoglossic.
Sociolinguistically, we witness two crucial developments which allow an
investigation of texts ‘from below’ in the Middle New High German period:
– First, the number of people who actively and passively were able to take part
in written communication rose from about ten per cent at the beginning to
almost hundred per cent at the end of this period (Grosse et al. 1989: 12).
For nineteenth-century German, for instance, we have at our disposal texts
not only from the elite, but from all strata of the society – even from the
lower classes (cf. Elspaß 2007b).
– Secondly, both the overall number of texts and as well as the range of text
types increased significantly during this period – including not only printed,
but also handwritten texts, especially private texts which represent ‘language
of immediacy’ or ‘conceptual orality’.
The data informing the analysis here (cf. 3) were taken from a corpus of texts
containing both features of ‘language of immediacy’ and texts from different strata
of society, or, to be more precise, by educated as well as partially-schooled writers.
The corpus consists of 648 private letters by writers from all German speaking
countries and regions with a total of 700,000 words. 60 of the 648 letters were
written by 25 people (mostly men) with secondary or higher education, and 588
letters by 248 writers – men and women – with primary education only. Most letter
writers were in the process of emigrating or had just emigrated (mainly to the US).
Several letters were written by relatives or friends of the emigrants at home (cf.
Elspaß 2005: 67–72 for details).
3. Conflicting views on a possible adaption of Jespersen’s Cycle for the history of
negation in German
Negation is a particularly well-researched topic in linguistic analyses, as it
exemplifies a concept which demonstrates a direct mapping of propositional logic
to human languages, in a way which is difficult to find for other grammatical
categories. In the standard varieties of modern Germanic languages, sentential
Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer
280
negation (as opposed to constituent negation) is expressed by a single free morpheme
(e.g. nicht in German or not in English) which negates the central proposition of the
sentence. In addition, bound morphemes such as un-, in-, or dis- etc. can co-occur
in the same sentence, but following the “laws” of propositional logic, the existence
of two negative elements in a sentence are deemed to cancel each other out and
result in a positive reading of the sentence:
1.a
A win is not likely
negative reading
1.b
A win is unlikely
negative reading
1.c A win is not unlikely
positive reading
In addition to the philosophical interest in the representation of negation in modern
standard languages, the history of negation in individual languages has attracted
plenty of scholarly interest as languages appear to change in certain predictable
ways. Multiple negation – with negative reading – is a well-known phenomenon
not just of many modern non-standard varieties but also historical stages from all
Germanic languages. The belief that a double negative is wrong “is perhaps the
most widely accepted of all popular convictions about ‘correctness’” (Aitchison
2001: 12; cf. also Cheshire 1998). Most famously, Jespersen’s cycle, proposed
some 100 years ago by the Danish Anglicist Otto Jespersen (1917), suggests that
there is a linear development between different stages (Figure 1):
clitic
grammaticalization of
minimizer or (n)-indefinite
clitic + free morpheme
free morpheme
loss of clitic
Figure 1. Jespersen’s Cycle (adapted from Jäger 2008: 15)
These three stages have been attested, for example, in the histories of most Germanic
languages, where typically the oldest attested stages form negation with a preverbal negative clitic, followed by a stage where the negative reading was optionally
strengthened with a supporting word, followed by the grammaticalization of the
supporting word as an obligatory negative marker, and finally with the loss of the
clitic. In German we would thus find:
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
281
Table 3. Phases of negation in German according to Jespersen’s Cycle (following
Donhauser 1996: 202)
Phase I (OHG):
ni +
V fin
Phase II (OHG):
ni
+
V fin +
(niwiht)
Phase III (MHG):
en/ni
+
V fin
+
niht
Phase IV (ENHG):
(ne)
+
V fin
+
nicht
V fin
+
nicht
Phase V ([M]NHG):
ni/en/ne:
negative (clitic) particle
niwiht/ni(c)ht:
negative particle (≈ ‘nothing’)
The traditional view of ‘Jespersen’s cycle’ implies a development from a
mononegative construction in Old High German with a negative pre-verbal particle
(ni) to a double negative system in Middle High German in which the weakened
particle is strengthened by an additional post-finite negation particle (niht < niwiht) and finally back to a mononegative system in New High German. Thus,
Jespersen’s Cycle describes “the repeated pattern of successive weakening and
restrengthening of the negative marker” (Horn [1989: 446], quoted from Lenz
1996: 183). According to Barbara Lenz (1996: 184–5), Jespersen’s Cycle can be
observed in other Germanic languages such as English, Dutch and Norwegian.
Table 4. Jespersen’s Cycle in English, Dutch and Norwegian (traditional view,
from Lenz 1996: 184–5)
English
OE
ic ne sege
EME I ne seye not
Dutch
Norwegian
OLF en + V
ON ne + V
MD en + V + niet
MN ne + V + eigi/ekki
LME I say not
NE
I do not say
I don’t say
[aj dn sæj]
ND
V + niet
NN V + ikke
The cross-linguistic comparison seems to yield strong evidence for the existence
of Jespersen’s Cycle in the Germanic languages. It is for the other contributors
to this volume to say whether this is still regarded as an adequate model for the
history of negation in English, Dutch or French. For German, it is certainly not
unanimously accepted. Almost as a response to Lenz’ article (and published in the
same conference volume), Karin Donhauser (1996) casts doubts on the validity of
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Jespersen’s Cycle for the history of German. She has two main objections. First,
she stresses that the assumption that the major periods in German, i. e. Old, Middle
and New High German, are characterized either by only mononegation or only
polynegation simply ignores the available data. Throughout Old High German
texts, for instance, polynegation had always been an option, see example (2) from
the Old High German Tatian translation (adopted from Donhauser 1996: 203):
2. Ther heilant ni gab iru nihhein antuurti (Tatian 85,3)
‘the Saviour NEG gave her NEG-a/one answer’
Donhauser also points to the fact that polynegation may not be acceptable in the
standard written variety of contemporary High German, but that it certainly is
acceptable, if not common, in non-standard varieties, such as dialects and colloquial
German. Her objections to the validity of Jespersen’s Cycle for German can be
further supported by data from Agnes Jäger’s study on the History of German
Negation which demonstrates that in none of the three Middle High German texts
which she studied, the two-partite negation with the negative particle was “the
one dominant pattern to express sentential negation” (Jäger 2008: 120). Similarly,
Anne Breitbarth’s Middle Low German corpus has only 37.4% of two-partite
constructions with ‘en…n-word’, whereas in 62.4% “n-words are able to mark
sentential negation on their own” (Breitbarth and Haegemann 2010: 70).
Donhauser’s second objection is that the traditional view of Jespersen’s Cycle
only focuses on the negation particles ne/en and nicht and that it does not take
into account other means to express negation in German like negation pronouns,
such as niemand ‘nobody’, kein(e/er) ‘no-one’, or other negation adverbs, such as
nie ‘never’, nirgends ‘nowhere’, keinesfalls ‘under no circumstances’ (Donhauser
1996: 203).
Donhauser’s general argument is that Jespersen’s Cycle does not adequately
describe the history of German negation. Rather, the development may more aptly
be described as degrammaticalisation or lexicalisation, in that the abstract feature
“Im Nonstandard, in den Dialekten und ebenso im standardsprachnahen gesprochenen
Deutsch, sind Mehrfachkennzeichnungen der Negation auch im Neuhochdeutschen möglich,
wenn nicht sogar geläufig.” (Donhauser 1996: 203). Wellmann (in press) even found as
many as 136 instances of double negation in the 7.3 billion words corpus “Deutsches
Referenzkorpus”, in a corpus of printed texts of contemporary German. In most of these
instances, double negation was used to create certain stylistic effects. In some cases, double
negation was formally part of a formular construction. A prominent example is the slogan
“Keine Macht für Niemand!” (‘No power to nobody!’), which is known in particular
from the title of the 1972 album of a famous German rock group and several books. Lenz
(1996: 190), however, only concedes that polynegation is possible in dialects („in einigen
regionalen Varianten des Deutschen, wie etwa dem Bairischen und dem Zürichdeutschen”).
Cf. footnote 8 for more data from present-day colloquial German.
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
283
NEG is moved from syntax to lexicon, where it defines a specific new lexical field.
Thus, polynegation was not a unique (and not even a dominant!) feature of Middle
High German syntax, rather it was and remained a structural option throughout the
history of German (“eine durchgehend präsente Strukturoption”, ibid.).
4. (New) Data from the history of New High German
For our purposes, the important problem with Jespersen’s elegant model is that it
suggests a linearity of development, while we argue that historical stages are never
as discrete as the model would require them to be. It also ignores the sociolinguistic
side of the history of German which, we argue, is particularly important for an
assessment of the history of negation. Certainly, systemic changes in language
histories occur, and for the case of negation we witness the loss of the proclitic
en in the medieval stages of Dutch and English. As for German, the grammars
of Early New High German attest last occurrences of the two-partite negation in
the sixteenth century (Ebert 1993: 426). A new corpus of interrogation records of
witch craft trials, however, reveals instances of this type of double negation for the
beginning of the seventeenth century (Macha et al. 2005: 86):
3. O ich en Kan nicht. ... ichn Kan nicht. ... ich nichten weiß ... ich en kan
nicht (Minden 1614, 60, 63, 65, 69; our emphasis)
“O I NEG can NOT … I NEG-can NOT … I NOT-NEG know … I NEG can
NOT”
But crucially, the perceived loss of the (emphatic) negative reading of other types
of multiple or polynegation (Jespersen’s stage 3) only occurred in the respective
written languages, due to external, sociolinguistic factors, namely the prescriptive
influence of grammarians in the eighteenth century. No such systemic changes
occurred in oral varieties, which had not been subjected to the interference of
prescriptivists. These changes in the written languages did not coincide with the
beginnings of grammar writings: in the first German grammars from the 1570s,
double negation was presented as a “legitimate, sometimes even positive […] rule
of German” (Langer 2001: 167). However, influenced by rationalist thinking, late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians considered double negatives as
ungrammatical and succeeded in creating the myth that such constructions are
illogical (ibid.: 171–2). From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find
“das abstrakte Merkmal NEG verlagert sich von der Syntax in das Lexikon und definiert
dort ein Wortfeld, das in einer spezifischen Weise wortartübergreifend organisiert ist” (Don­
hauser 1996: 206).
Similarly Jäger’s erudite study on the history of negation in German (2008) excludes
socio­linguistic concerns and, somewhat surprisingly, focuses almost exclusively on data pre1500.
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examples where grammarians note that multiple negation causes emphatic negative
reading – rather than cancelling each other out and yielding positive reading:
4. Duae negationes apud Germanus [!] non affirmant, sed magis negant: vt Es
ist keiner unter denen nicht, der etwas guets thuet. (Ölinger [1574: 192],
quoted in Langer 2001: 161; our emphasis)
‘amongst the Germans, two negations do not affirm, but negate more
strongly, e.g. there is not noone amongst those, who contributes anything
good.’
5. Zwey zusammen gesetzte Verneinungswörter verneinen noch härter, wie
auch bey den Griechen vnd Franzosen / als: Es sol der Guldenen bulle
nichts nicht benommen und abgebrochen seyn. (Girbert [1653: tab. LXIV],
as quoted in Langer 2001: 163; our emphasis)
‘two conjoined negative words negate even harder, as it is the case amongst
the Greeks and the French, as in: nothing should not be taken from the
Golden Bull.’
And in the seventeenth century we continue to find this usage in texts written
by grammarians and language teachers on grammar, e.g. in Johannes Angelus
Sumaran’s discussion of Italian letters:
6. k Kein k haben sie gar nit / sondern anstatt deß k, brauchen sie das ch
nemblich / che cosa, liß ke cosa (Sumaran [1623: 26], as quoted in Langer
2001: 162; our emphasis)
‘k – no k do they have not, but instead of the k, they use ch, che cosa,
pronounced ke cosa.’
However, seventeenth-century grammarians seem to have become somewhat
sensitive towards the use of polynegation. Justus Georg Schottelius, for instance,
eliminated “a handful of double negatives” in his 1663 grammar (Ausführliche
Arbeit Von der Teutschen HaubtSprache) compared to his earlier grammar
(Teutsche Sprachkunst) from 1641, but “still listed double negatives of the form mit
nichten nicht as an acceptable emphatic form of negation in the grammar of 1663”
(McLelland 2011: 293).
From the late seventeenth century we find the first comments by grammarians
rejecting this usage but, as Carl Friedrich Aichinger’s comment shows, it was still
in use in the eighteenth century:
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
285
7. Die Teutschen brauchen offt, wie die Griechen und Franzosen zwo Ver­
neinungen, ohne daß eine Bejahung draus wird. (Aichinger [1754: 457], as
quoted in Langer 2001: 168)
‘The Germans frequently use, just like the Greeks and French, two negations,
without this resulting in affirmative reading.‘
The famous eighteenth-century grammarian Johann Christoph Gottsched simply
stated that this use – though acceptable in the past – was old-fashioned in his
time and ought to be abolished from good writing (Gottsched [1759], as quoted
in Langer 2001: 169), and after Gottsched, no grammarian of (written) German
proposed that two negative elements in a clause yielded emphatic negative
reading. The nineteenth-century grammarian Heinrich August Schötensack (1856:
557), for example, claimed that New High German had adopted the ‘law’ in Latin
grammar that a double negative makes a positive, i. e. an affirmative statement.
Such references to language models as ideal norms to be followed are well-known
from prescriptive grammars, not just of German but also, e.g., English (cf. TiekenBoon van Ostade et al. 1998). As we saw above, however, polynegation existed and
was also noted by German grammarians as existing in Ancient Greek and French,
yet the model of Latin – where double negation caused positive reading – was
clearly seen to be superior and to be followed instead.
How did these stigmatisations affect language use? According to standard
textbooks on the history of German, double negation had virtually vanished from
written German by the beginning of the eighteenth century (Admoni 1990: 187).
This is certainly true for formal and printed texts, and its disappearance from
such texts is possibly due to an almost systematic stigmatisation of double and
polynegation by eighteenth century grammarians and schoolmasters (cf. Davies and
Langer 2006: 246–251). But had the construction died out from spoken German?
As noted earlier, in a number of dialects and non-standard supra-regional varieties
of German – as in English (Cheshire 1998), Flemish (Breitbarth and Haegemann
2010), and Low German (cf. e.g. Lindow et al. 1998: 284–5, Reershemius 2004:
76) – and even in colloquial standard German polynegation never ceased to exist.
And the fact that a grammarian and grammar school teacher like Schötensack felt
the need to issue a ban on double negatives in his nineteenth-century grammar
would clearly suggest that he encountered the construction in everyday spoken and
probably even written language.
Note that some grammarians as early as Stieler ([1691], as quoted in Langer 2001:
165) offered a more differentiated view on different types of polynegation which ought
to be used sparingly and according to good judgement (“nach dem Gehörurteil”). Stieler
further reports that whilst the use of two separate negative words (= free morphemes) yields
emphatic negative reading, this is not the case where one of the negative elements is a bound
morpheme. Examples such as Es ist nicht unbillig have positive reading and sound milder
(“klinget gelinder”) than Es ist billig (and thus echoing its modern usage today).
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In this context, it is worth noting that even the ‘best authors’ of German
literature, classical writers such as Schiller, Goethe and other eighteenth and
nineteenth-century writers employed double negatives repeatedly in their works, as
they seem to have appreciated the stylistic nuances that the use of double negatives
can create (Paul 1920: 334). Wladimir Admoni, one of the leading experts on the
historical syntax of German, provides us with a brief but revealing comment on
double negatives in nineteenth-century German. In his textbook of 1990, he writes
that ‘in modal-affirmative contexts, double negation only occurs in the representa­
tion of coarser types of colloquial language’ (ibid.: 225, our emphasis). Here the
existence of double negatives is denied on purely stylistic grounds, or in other
words, we are confronted with the elitist view that non-standard varieties do not
have a legitimate place in the history of language and language change (cf. Milroy
1999: 30–1).
These observations are important in our assessment of the applicability of
Jespersen’s cycle, which, as we argue, does not explain the lack of change in nonstandard varieties where multiple negation with negative reading continues to
survive, contrary to Jespersen’s predictions. We argue that the data used in previous
accounts of the systemic history of negation is only able to paint such a picture
because a significant body of other data has largely been ignored by academic
research, in particular that of oral varieties and registers. In the following, we
will try to provide a better and more comprehensive view of the actual range of
grammatical possibilities and variants of the language at the time by extending the
traditional corpus of German texts to include data from ‘language of immediacy’.
In Elspaß’s (2005) corpus of nineteenth-century emigrant letters, we find – in our
view unsurprisingly – a number of examples with multiple negative elements. In
some of these examples we encounter a use of negation identical to that in written
German, i. e. where two negative elements cancel each other out and their use is
motivated by stylistic consideration:
8.
Meine Lieben, es ist nicht unmöglich daß dieses mein letztes Schreiben ist
(letter by Friedrich Martens, 15.06.1861, from Elspaß 2005)
‘My dears, it is not impossible that this is my last letter.’
However, the majority of instances of multiple negation are used to express
emphatic negative reading, even though it has been assumed (by Admoni 1990 and
others) to have disappeared from written German by then:
“Im modal-affirmativen Bereich des Satzes kommt die doppelte Negation nur bei der
Wiedergabe der gröberen Umgangssprache vor.”
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
287
9.
er habe ihr nihe das Heirathen nicht versprochen. (letter by Friedrich
Schano [26.02.1853], from Elspaß 2005)
“he has her never the marriage not promised”
‘He has never promised to marry her.’
10.
sag ja zu nimant nichts weil es braucht nimant was wisen (letter by Johann
Händler [19.02./03.1924], from Elspaß 2005)
“say MOD-PART to nobody nothing because it-needs nobody something
know”
‘Just don’t tell anybody, because that’s none of their business.’
Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of polynegative constructions with this reading
in letters by writers with only basic school education (as documented in Elspaß
2005: 539–57). It shows a particularly strong use in the south of Germany. A quarter
of the writers (20 out of 77) from the Upper German dialect regions used double
negatives at least once in their letters, whereas only 8 out of 84 writers from the
Central German and 4 out of 96 writers from the Low German dialect regions used
such constructions. Note that the texts are not written in dialect, as even a fleeting
glance over the examples 9 to 12 shows; this also explains why the texts from the
north yield so few instances of polynegation despite the fact that polynegation is
an established and frequent construction of Low German, the dialect of the north
(Lindow et al. 1998: 284–5). Instead, the writers of the letters aimed at what they
must have considered to be ‘proper’ written German – the target variety of their
schooling – albeit in an informal register, as their letters were written to family and
friends.
The data from figure 2 indicating a regional preference of the use of double negation
can be supported by present-day data from the ‘Atlas of colloquial German’ (“Atlas zur
deutschen Alltagssprache”, cf. Elspaß and Möller 2003), acquired 2005/06 from 2626
informants from 399 towns in the German-speaking countries. Two maps show that nearly
all towns for which the informants suggested that the use of double negation is ‘typical’ are
situated in the Upper German dialect region, cf. http://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde_3/
f07f_f08a/ [14/2/2012].
Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer
288
West Low German
Low
4
Franconian
(76)
East Low German
-(20)
-(12)
East Central German
2
West Central German
(14)
6
North
(70)
Upper German
-(9)
West Upper German
East Upper German
12
8
(50)
(18)
Figure 2. (Raw) number of 19th century letter writers using double negatives.
(Numbers in brackets give the total number of letters from the respective area.)
Most of the 43 instances of double negatives in the letter corpus are of the type
kein(-) + nicht, as in examples (11) and (12).
11.
kein geistiges getränk darf nicht verkauft werden (letter by Katharina
Hinterer [31.07.1887], from Elspaß 2005)
“no spirituous liquid is allowed not sold-to-be”
‘It is not allowed to sell spirits.’
12.
es sind nur Euchen und Pabele kein Fichten oder Dannen Baum ist hier
nicht (letter by Matthias Gamsjäger [09.12.1896], from Elspaß 2005)
“there are only oaks and poplars no spruce or pine tree is here not”
‘There are only oak trees and poplars. No spruce or pine tree is/can be found
here.’
kein(-) + nicht is also the most widely used type of double negation in Wellmann’s (in
press) study of present day standard German.
289
Jespersen’s Cycle and the History of German Negation
In general, ten different types of double negatives can be found in the letter corpus,
which can – in Donhauser’s terms – be described as part of the lexical field that
expresses negation in Middle New High German (Table 5):
Table 5. Types of double negatives in a nineteenth-century letter corpus (Elspaß
2005)
noch weder noch
kein(-)
nicht
nie(mals)
kein(-)
kein(-)
nichts
nie
nicht
kein(-)
niemand
niemand nichts
kein(-)
kein(-)
niemand
kein(-)
nicht (meh)r
nicht
Quantitatively, polynegation has never been a very prominent construction.
Whereas in the Early New High German period (1350–1650), “in certain regions,
up to 35% of negative sentences contained more than one negative marker”, by the
early seventeenth century, the highest frequency of polynegation was a mere 1.3%
in East Central German (Davies and Langer 2006: 242, following Pensel 1976).
Similarly, a recent study by Saskia Grandel (2011) on late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century interrogation records shows that only 2.4% (36 instances)
of negative sentences contained double negation (with texts from Eastern Upper
German again showing the highest proportion, i. e. 4.4%, cf. ibid.: 29).10 The
43 instances of double or multiple negation in the nineteenth-century letters
(entirely documented in Elspaß 2005: 277–80) constitute less than 1% of the c.
5,850 instances of negation in the whole corpus. But these numbers should not
be mistaken for an indicator of marginality of these constructions. As they were
frequently (or even mostly) used for emphasis, they were the marked rather than
the default case. Thus, to achieve certain stylistic effects, it seems quite natural
that a speaker or writer who had double negation in his or her linguistic repertoire
would use it sparsely. In the light of the main argument of our paper it is important
to note that multiple negation continuously belonged to this repertoire and that it
was and still is a structural option of many native speakers of German.
10
Grandel analysed 56 interrogation records of witch trials from Macha et al. (2005). 16
of them (28.6%) contained at least one case of double negation. Interestingly, in 28 out of
the 36 instances, double negation appeared in the documentation of the (voluntary or forced)
statements of the accused, see example 3 above. This may be considered as further evidence
for the preference of double negation in more ‘oral’ language registers in Middle New High
German.
290
Stephan Elspaß & Nils Langer
4. Conclusion
Recent claims by researchers like Donhauser (1996) that Jespersen’s cycle cannot
be as readily applied to the history of German as the model would require is
corroborated by new evidence from ‘oral’ text types like interrogation records and
private-letter correspondence. The important stage in Jespersen’s prediction where
a period of multiple negation is followed by a stage of mononegation is not borne
out by the German data which have come to light in (historical) sociolinguistic
research and, in particular, in a view of German language history ‘from below’.
This poses important questions not just for our understanding of the grammatical
developments of negation but also the historiography of languages in general. As,
among others, Ágel (2003), Reichmann (2005, for German) and Bex and Watts
(1999, for English) have shown, textbook accounts of language history are frequently
biased by a focus on standard languages, sketching the history of, say, German or
English, as an almost teleological path from the ‘confused’ variability of the Middle
Ages to the successful creation of a prestige language norm over the centuries. We
have sought here to provide further support for a much more differentiated view
of language history which departs from the monolithic perspective to embrace
the whole range of language varieties. In particular, an adequate language history
needs to acknowledge the role of non-standard varieties and oral language registers
much more than has previously been the case.
Universität Salzburg
University of Bristol
Stephan Elspass
Nils Langer
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